這一本書絕對是高中指定教材! 每次叫學生口頭報告，不是 TUESDAYS WITH
MORRIE 就是同作者的 THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU MEET IN HEAVEN 或是 ONE MORE
DAY! 老實說，這幾年來坐在研究室聽一個又一個學生一講就是十分鐘，還真有點兒......耳朵長繭。沒辦法！這就是我的工作呀！

今天是星期二，考試卷還有一大落。不如來讀個有趣的東西吧！

Chapter One

The last class of my old professor’s life took place once a week in
his house, by a window in the study where he could watch a small
hibiscus plant shed its pink leaves. The class met on Tuesdays. It
began after breakfast. The subject was The Meaning of Life. It was
taught from experience.

No grades were given, but there were oral exams each week. You were
expected to respond to questions, and you were expected to pose
questions of your own. You were also required to perform physical
tasks now and then, such as lifting the professor’s head to a
comfortable spot on the pillow or placing his glasses on the bridge
of his nose. Kissing him good-bye earned you extra credit.

No books were required, yet many topics were covered, including
love, work, community, family, aging, forgiveness, and, finally,
death. The last lecture was brief, only a few words.

A funeral was held in lieu of graduation.

Although no final exam was given, you were expected to produce one
long paper on what was learned. That paper is presented here.

The last class of my old professor’s life had only one student.

I was the student.

It is the late spring of 1979, a hot, sticky Saturday afternoon.
Hundreds of us sit together, side by side, in rows of wooden folding
chairs on the main campus lawn. We wear blue nylon robes. We listen
impatiently to long speeches. When the ceremony is over, we throw
our caps in the air, and we are officially graduated from college,
the senior class of Brandeis University in the city of Waltham,
Massachusetts. For many of us, the curtain has just come down on
childhood.

Afterward, I find Morrie Schwartz, my favorite professor, and
introduce him to my parents. He is a small man who takes small
steps, as if a strong wind could, at any time, whisk him up into the
clouds. In his graduation day robe, he looks like a cross between a
biblical prophet and a Christmas elf. He has sparkling blue-green
eyes, thinning silver hair that spills onto his forehead, big ears,
a triangular nose, and tufts of graying eyebrows. Although his teeth
are crooked and his lower ones are slanted back--as if someone had
once punched them in--when he smiles it’s as if you’d just told
him the first joke on earth.

He tells my parents how I took every class he taught. He tells
them, ”You have a special boy here.” Embarrassed, I look at my feet.
Before we leave, I hand my professor a present, a tan briefcase with
his initials on the front. I bought this the day before at a
shopping mall. I didn’t want to forget him. Maybe I didn’t want
him to forget me.

”Mitch, you are one of the good ones,” he says, admiring the
briefcase. Then he hugs me. I feel his thin arms around my back. I
am taller than he is, and when he holds me, I feel awkward, older,
as if I were the parent and he were the child.

He asks if I will stay in touch, and without hesitation I say, ”Of
course.”

When he steps back, I see that he is crying.

CHAPTER TWO


The Syllabus

His death sentence came in the summer of 1994. Looking back, Morrie
knew something bad was coming long before that. He knew it the day
he gave up dancing.

He had always been a dancer, my old professor. The music didn’t
matter. Rock and roll, big band, the blues. He loved them all. He
would close his eyes and with a blissful smile begin to move to his
own sense of rhythm. It wasn’t always pretty. But then, he didn’t
worry about a partner. Morrie danced by himself.

He used to go to this church in Harvard Square every Wednesday night
for something called ”Dance Free.” They had flashing lights and
booming speakers and Morrie would wander in among the mostly student
crowd, wearing a white T-shirt and black sweatpants and a towel
around his neck, and whatever music was playing, that’s the music
to which he danced. He’d do the lindy to Jimi Hendrix. He twisted and twirled, he waved his arms like a conductor on amphetamines,
until sweat was dripping down the middle of his back. No one there
knew he was a prominent doctor of sociology, with years of
experience as a college professor and several well-respected books.
They just thought he was some old nut.

Once, he brought a tango tape and got them to play it over the
speakers. Then he commandeered the floor, shooting back and forth
like some hot Latin lover. When he finished, everyone applauded. He
could have stayed in that moment forever.

But then the dancing stopped.

He developed asthma in his sixties. His breathing became labored.
One day he was walking along the Charles River, and a cold burst of
wind left him choking for air. He was rushed to the hospital and
injected with Adrenalin.

A few years later, he began to have trouble walking. At a birthday
party for a friend, he stumbled inexplicably. Another night, he fell
down the steps of a theater, startling a small crowd of people.

”Give him air!” someone yelled.

He was in his seventies by this point, so they whispered ”old age”
and helped him to his feet. But Morrie, who was always more in touch
with his insides than the rest of us, knew something else was wrong.
This was more than old age. He was weary all the time. He had
trouble sleeping. He dreamt he was dying.

He began to see doctors. Lots of them. They tested his blood. They
tested his urine. They put a scope up his rear end and looked inside
his intestines. Finally, when nothing could be found, one doctor
ordered a muscle biopsy, taking a small piece out of Morrie’s calf.
The lab report came back suggesting a neurological problem, and
Morrie was brought in for yet another series of tests. In one of
those tests, he sat in a special seat as they zapped him with
electrical current--an electric chair, of sorts--and studied his
neurological responses.

”We need to check this further,” the doctors said, looking over his
results.

”Why?” Morrie asked. ”What is it?”

”We’re not sure. Your times are slow.”

His times were slow? What did that mean?

Finally, on a hot, humid day in August 1994, Morrie and his wife,
Charlotte, went to the neurologist’s office, and he asked them to
sit before he broke the news: Morrie had amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis (ALS), Lou Gehrig’s disease, a brutal, unforgiving
illness of the neurological system.

There was no known cure.

”How did I get it?” Morrie asked.

Nobody knew.

”Is it terminal?”

Yes.

”So I’m going to die?”

Yes, you are, the doctor said. I’m very sorry.

He sat with Morrie and Charlotte for nearly two hours, patiently
answering their questions. When they left, the doctor gave them some
information on ALS, little pamphlets, as if they were opening a bank
account. Outside, the sun was shining and people were going about
their business. A woman ran to put money in the parking meter.
Another carried groceries. Charlotte had a million thoughts running
through her mind: How much time do we have left? How will we manage?
How will we pay the bills?

My old professor, meanwhile, was stunned by the normalcy of the day
around him. Shouldn’t the world stop? Don’t they know what has
happened to me?

But the world did not stop, it took no notice at all, and as Morrie
pulled weakly on the car door, he felt as if he were dropping into a
hole.

Now what? he thought.

As my old professor searched for answers, the disease took him over,
day by day, week by week. He backed the car out of the garage one
morning and could barely push the brakes. That was the end of his
driving.

He kept tripping, so he purchased a cane. That was the end of his
walking free.

He went for his regular swim at the YMCA, but found he could no
longer undress himself. So he hired his first home care worker--a
theology student named Tony--who helped him in and out of the pool,
and in and out of his bathing suit. In the locker room, the other
swimmers pretended not to stare. They stared anyhow. That was the
end of his privacy.

In the fall of 1994, Morrie came to the hilly Brandeis campus to
teach his final college course. He could have skipped this, of
course. The university would have understood. Why suffer in front of
so many people? Stay at home. Get your affairs in order. But the
idea of quitting did not occur to Morrie.

Instead, he hobbled into the classroom, his home for more than
thirty years. Because of the cane, he took a while to reach the
chair. Finally, he sat down, dropped his glasses off his nose, and
looked out at the young faces who stared back in silence.

”My friends, I assume you are all here for the Social Psychology
class. I have been teaching this course for twenty years, and this
is the first time I can say there is a risk in taking it, because I
have a fatal illness. I may not live to finish the semester.

”If you feel this is a problem, I understand if you wish to drop the
course.”

He smiled.

And that was the end of his secret.

ALS is like a lit candle: it melts your nerves and leaves your body
a pile of wax. Often. it begins with the legs and works its way up.
You lose control of your thigh muscles, so that you cannot support
yourself standing. You lose control of your trunk muscles, so that
you cannot sit up straight. By the end, if you are still alive, you
are breathing through a tube in a hole in your throat, while your
soul, perfectly awake, is imprisoned inside a limp husk, perhaps
able to blink, or cluck a tongue, like something from a science
fiction movie, the man frozen inside his own flesh. This takes no
more than five years from the day you contract the disease.

Morrie’s doctors guessed he had two years left.

Morrie knew it was less.

But my old professor had made a profound decision, one he began to
construct the day he came out of the doctor’s office with a sword
hanging over his head. Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make
the best of my time left? he had asked himself.

He would not wither. He would not be ashamed of dying.

Instead, he would make death his final project, the center point of
his days. Since everyone was going to die, he could be of great
value, right? He could be research. A human textbook. Study me in my
slow and patient demise. Watch what happens to me. Learn with me.

Morrie would walk that final bridge between life and death, and
narrate the trip.

The fall semester passed quickly. The pills increased. Therapy
became a regular routine. Nurses came to his house to work with
Morrie’s withering legs, to keep the muscles active, bending them
back and forth as if pumping water from a well. Massage specialists
came by once a week to try to soothe the constant, heavy stiffness
he felt. He met with meditation teachers, and closed his eyes and
narrowed his thoughts until his world shrunk down to a single
breath, in and out, in and out.

One day, using his cane, he stepped onto the curb and fell over into
the street. The cane was exchanged for a walker. As his body
weakened, the back and forth to the bathroom became too exhausting,
so Morrie began to urinate into a large beaker. He had to support
himself as he did this, meaning someone had to hold the beaker while
Morrie filled it.

Most of us would be embarrassed by all this, especially at Morrie’s
age. But Morrie was not like most of us. When some of his close
colleagues would visit, he would say to them, ”Listen, I have to
pee. Would you mind helping? Are you okay with that?”

Often, to their own surprise, they were.

In fact, he entertained a growing stream of visitors. He had
discussion groups about dying, what it really meant, how societies
had always been afraid of it without necessarily understanding it.
He told his friends that if they really wanted to help him, they
would treat him not with sympathy but with visits, phone calls, a
sharing of their problems--the way they had always shared their
problems, because Morrie had always been a wonderful listener.

For all that was happening to him, his voice was strong and
inviting, and his mind was vibrating with a million thoughts. He was
intent on proving that the word ”dying” was not synonymous
with ”useless.”

The New Year came and went. Although he never said it to anyone,
Morrie knew this would be the last year of his life. He was using a
wheelchair now, and he was fighting time to say all the things he
wanted to say to all the people he loved. When a colleague at
Brandeis died suddenly of a heart attack, Morrie went to his
funeral. He came home depressed.

”What a waste,” he said. ”All those people saying all those
wonderful things, and Irv never got to hear any of it.”

Morrie had a better idea. He made some calls. He chose a date. And
on a cold Sunday afternoon, he was joined in his home by a small
group of friends and family for a ”living funeral.” Each of them
spoke and paid tribute to my old professor. Some cried. Some
laughed. One woman read a poem:


”My dear and loving cousin ...
Your ageless heart
as you move through time, layer on layer,
tender sequoia ...”
Morrie cried and laughed with them. And all the heartfelt things we
never get to say to those we love, Morrie said that day. His ”living
funeral” was a rousing success.

Only Morrie wasn’t dead yet.

In fact, the most unusual part of his life was about to unfold.